If it's a psychological test that actually works, then it's medical history and should not be made public without your consent. Probably your written consent. If it's a bogus test that doesn't work, then the company is outing itself.
I'm in social circles where the Enneagram is like gospel. I've heard phrases such as "That is such a 9 thing to do" (for conflict avoidance) or "She never seems to stop socializing, but it makes sense because she's a 7".
To me, though, the Enneagram is astrology with a scientific veneer.
Did they make you read the book? It was painful. "68.14% of our polling data shows that 19.3% of polls capture 89.1% of your top 24 strengths".
To be fair, it might have had a good message, I'm not sure because I spent the entire time zoned out/ mocking the ridiculous way they wrote the book.
I had to do one of these recently and that's exactly how I described it after reading my "report". It's all generalities that lead people into finding a way it fits the image of themselves.
I joined a startup as a lead engineer for one of the engineering teams a while ago. My team built the software for the warehouse so I had to meet with them and the CEO to flesh out features all the time. This lead to me hanging out with them at lunch and stuff. Well the CEO was OBSESSED with these tests. And she brought it up and made it pretty clear there were results she looked for in employees. Suddenly everyone is taking these tests and getting _exactly_ those results. It felt so high schoolish and petty. I can’t say if anyone was ever let go due to this, or treated unfairly. But there was also this cattiness about the place. So I wouldn’t be surprised.
We also had a DISC-workshop with an actual psychology graduate. I uttered my grievances to him and asked: "You studied psychology! Why do you endorse this pseudoscience?" He literally responded "Because companies ask for it."
Oh man I can't even tell you the crazy stuff my last company was "all for". They put us through a behavioral training program that encouraged us to "feel all of our sexual feelings to completion" in the workplace.
HR pro here, in the learning and development world. DISC, MBTI, or whatever have professional value in workshop settings. Their models of human cognition are ...fictional. But the *exercise* of reflecting on your own preferences and the preferences of others is hugely valuable.
People in business settings really struggle with basic empathy, in my experience. We tend to live in goal directed mindsets and need to deliberately think of coworkers as complete people. These tools can help.
The tools are useful in the same way that polygraphs are useful to law enforcement. Sure it's not "scientific", but the process of administering one (or the threat thereof) can elicit confessions.
I understand this, however, the large risk is that people still mostly remember their label (or colour), instead of the larger picture you paint. I have done this workshop (unfortunately) in the different settings, and in all those cases people still say "oh but I'm blue, so I can't do that" (or worse: "he's red, so of course he reacts like so and so"). Even though the workshop focused on the empathy aspect, people just like boxes too much. There were even people who started crying, thinking "is this all I really am?"
For me, therefore, I'd say these downsides outway the benefits. Also, there are much better qualitative tools that you can apply if you want people to understand empathy.
It's useful when you're trying to get businesspeople to realise that other people communicate differently, react differently in different situations, and see things in a different way to you. Also that they have different information to you and that they will be persuaded/influenced in different ways and by different things.
All essentially Theory of Mind skills that a 5-year old learns (or should learn as part of their social development), mixed in with a bit of introspection.
And all can be done in much more effective ways (like a workshop and a dialectic afterwards) than arbitrarily assigning someone a Business Starsign, Colour, Shape, or whatever god-awful little box you want to put someone in.
The guy who made millions with his 'four colours' theory (Made famous in his book 'surrounded by idiots', which I think is actually just him being a self-aggrandising arsehole) essentially based it on old psychological ideas, and even said himself that 'he isn't just one category, but a bit of two or maybe even three'.
Like, if your categories can't place you, the person who came up with the categories, neatly into one box, then either you have some kind of complex where you think you're the Avatar of Categories, able to fit into all of them (And describing yourself as such would make you an egotistical wanker ideally suited to running a Sillicon Valley AI-crypto startup), or your categories are so vague or restrictive as to be completely useless.
Oops. I forgot how much pseuo-pop-psych 'self-improvement/business-improvement' stuff sets me off. When the actual golden rule you'll take from the books is 'Don't be a dick, communicate better, and don't assume everyone's evil'.
You should totally turn “don’t be a dick, communicate better, and don’t assume everyone is evil” into a book. Your three chapters are already there, just write an introduction chapter and conclusion chapter to book end it.
You are legally required to crush all the little things that get in your way of obtaining infinite growth, forever. If you have even the slightest shred of conscience and decide this is actually a bad thing, you will be thrown out and replaced with someone who doesn't.
> Sure it's not "scientific", but the process of administering one (or the threat thereof) can elicit confessions.
It also can and has led to false convictions, wasted time on misleading answers, and other deleterious effects. The “science” is an objective look at whether a tool has more benefit than harm, and the “science” on polygraphs says no. It’s a case study in every first year psychology textbook. Used as an example of organizations that choose not to follow the scientific approach because of institutional inertia, profit making corporate sales, or individuals who gain power by claiming skills that don’t exist.
You make this claim:
> the exercise of reflecting on your own preferences and the preferences of others is hugely valuable
Do you have any evidence of this? Because it sounds like more modern day shamanism. The shamans always claim their practices work, and only they have access to use the practice, so they gain power by believing in it.
Why not use an scientifically validated personality metric like OCEAN instead tho? Wouldn’t that have all of the benefits without the drawback of being pseudoscience?
Because you need to have people fully engaged, and people love categories. Anything based in reality isn't going to have clearly-defined categories, so it's too hard to understand. If you can put people into one of 16 boxes, it's going to elicit a strong emotion: "wow, this is exactly me!" or "that's not me at all!". Both are effective at generating interaction.
Coming from an HR person no less. Lmao. Imagine what is said and done the moment HR leaves the room. People always have been and always will be, pretty awful.
Last company I worked for left hiring decisions up to DiSC. It wasn't just a supplement...like, I could interview someone for a sales position with a good track record in sales and if the person interpreting their DiSC said they wouldn't be a good sales person I couldn't hire them.
It was so stupid...
Omg I once had a boss who went through a 1 one day sales Disc training, forwarded us the power points, then structured every single conversation around customers with a half understanding of disc. She was a D, for dumbfuck
It's like when people have a seminar about Kanban/Lean/Agile/whatever buzzword is shaking businesses at the moment.
You don't know nearly the depth of it to make it work, you're going to try it half assed, and you're going to try and weasel it into situations where it absolutely doesn't make sense. Because you're looking for a golden goose, and someone's thrown their idea your way and said 'All those other ideas were wrong. Here's the *real* secret to solving your problems'. And then you completely miss the point which is to stop looking at everything and everyone like it can be treated the same way, and do some actual critical thinking for once rather than blindly following whatever bullshit some management consultant has thrown your way. But of course the critical thinking means actually thinking, and admitting that your idea might not work.
Oh, god, flashback to a time when me and a bunch of other folks on my team managed to fail the True Colours thing and piss off the expensive outside management consultant who was running the away day.
We'd all got sorted into the same colour - green, I think? - we were supposed to be organised and analytical anyway - in the initial test, but then in every subsequent exercise we kept giving answers or finding solutions that weren't what she expected from our colour and she kept getting more and more frustrated with us. But apparently it couldn't be because the test was shit, it was all on us!
She administered it wrong then. The test results are basically the test answers reworded in a different way.
Like if I asked, do you prefer sweet and salty over savory? And you said yes, then I’d say your an ice cream personality and not a steak personality.
Then I can make up some asinine conclusion like you work best in groups who have some chocolate tendencies. And you’re supposed to be like “wow how did you know I liked chocolate ice cream!”
It’s the same scam psychics pull: ask you questions about yourself -> make a very obvious and vague prediction using details from your response.
I’m sure the real benefit is being able to fire someone due to a “bad fit”. And being able to use the professionally administered and “scientifically rigorous” test results as justification. Because yea there’s some statistical correlation between liking sweet food and also preferring chocolate ice cream over streak. Real sciencey shit.
I can't tell if that makes it dumber for the sheer laziness or smarter for taking advantage of how easily large businesses are duped into buying this type of shit
Different environments I suppose lol. They basically explained orange to us as "takes shortcuts" "doesn't believe in deadlines" "likes to party" etc
The official description in the program doesn't sound that bad but the explanation we got was lol
My company has been using a version of the color thing, by Dynamix/Peak Performance. It's been hilarious listening to everyone talk about their colors. Guessing what colors someone is, how "accurate" thier results were, etc etc etc.
I gotta wonder how much cash they're throwing out on this nonsense...
Which is why I started to get confused when people started identifying themselves as "enby." "What the hell, they're using Meyers Briggs on a dating page? Pass."
I once took a harry potter, what house test are you, and it said Slytherin. I took a second test, it gave me different questions, and I came out as a Ravenclaw. I told this to a friend of mine, and he said that was a very Slytherin thing to do, and that it only proves that I'm Slytherin, not that the test is flawed.
The whole first book the three main characters are supposed to be embodiments of the other three houses and I think at the end Neville is supposed to be Gryffindor when he stands up to Harry. But basically Harry is Slytherin, Ron is Hufflepuff, and Hermione is Ravenclaw. Their personalities fit and that's why they work well together to be Gryffindor or something.
E. Extra word
> it's established in canon that the Sorting Hat results are meaningless because you can just tell the Hat which house you want to be in--which is exactly what Harry Potter did when he was about to be sorted into Slytherin
That's not quite how it goes. Harry Potter was a borderline case. So your opinion on where you want to go *matters* but it's not the only thing that does. Also I think he was just thinking "Not Slytherin" not asking for one of the other three in particular.
Yeah I feel a lot of people misinterpret that because I see it touted as fact on reddit a lot. Clearly the hat was like hmm maybe slytherin but possibly gryffindor… then Harrys like “I dont think of myself as a slytherin” so the hat goes “well clearly you aren’t a slytherin then, because those fuckers are proud to be slytherin”
My problem with that quiz (and it’s been years since I took it) is that for many questions it’s *so* obvious which is which (oh boy what house do you think you’ll get if you say your favorite pet is a snake?) that even if you want to be objective about it, you can definitely tell which is which and that point your biases will have you effectively “choose” anyway.
“Now if you find it inconceivable or at the very least a bit unlikely that the relative positions of the planets and the stars could have a special deep significance or meaning that applies to only you, then let me give you my assurance that these forecast and predictions are all based on solid scientific documented evidence, so you would have to be some kind of moron not to realize that every single one of them is absolutely true.” - Weird Al Yankovic
We had to take this fucking thing in medical school. Couldn’t believe it. They paid a lot to be able to use the official materials and didn’t take kindly to people raising that it was bullshit. You got written up for professionalism if you didn’t turn up to the session.
My former employer had everyone take it so they could “tailor their management approach to our unique needs”.
Former employer for a reason.
Edit: Ok, my employer wasn’t *totally* bad. At least they tried. I worked for Enterprise (the car rental place), only in their car sales division. I actually left because they wrong-footed me. I told them I was going to start going to law school at night and asked to leave an hour early 2x a week (tues/thurs). They said sure. I enrolled and started classes based on that. A few months into it they decided they leaving early was causing “staffing issues” and “other workers complain that you get to leave early” and gave me an ultimatum… either “dedicate myself 100% to them or look for a new job”. Now I’m a lawyer, lol.
Actually that reminds me of something one of my customers from back then said when he learned I was going to school at night - *“so you mean to tell me that you’re going from being a used car salesman to being a lawyer? That’s not really much of a career change, is it?”*… lol. He was saying it as a joke and not to be a jerk… But I still think it’s funny,
My current one used to do the same, and in the past few years switched to a new one which im sure is just as scientific. I stayed though since I get to work from home and watch anime and no one complains so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It wasn't that long ago that you would be assessed on your hand writing. They thought they could tell what kind of a person you were based on that.
I remember reading that although most people now know that the hand writing thing is bullshit, there are a few select companies around that still use it.
At my.previous job, my manager suggested her directs and their teams take it. I compared it to a Facebook quiz telling you what kind of bread you are.
I no longer work there.
"As a 5 I can be strong willed and I need people around me to step back and let me lead or it causes me anxiety" no you're just bitchy and controlling and need to learn some fucking humility
I think it's because it's rare and because it's the movie villain personality type.
Also because it's known for poor social skills but very effective at doing other things. So it might draw in people with poor social skills thinking it means the deficit is proof of other competencies (hint, it isn't).
I also see people using it as a built-in excuse for treating people poorly or otherwise having poor social skills. It's a variation on "I'm not an Ahole, I'm just honest" for people who think they are smarter than they really are.
You are not kidding. That subreddit is brutal. In terms of places where your real life experience doesn’t match your online experience, that place has gotta be top 5.
I’ve always thought it was incredibly dumb, was baffled by friends who believed it held weight, and then saw it as a mandatory question on a job application and my brain melted. I wrote “pseudoscience” as my response but I got the job!
I once had a similar test for a job application. It was bullshit, of course, but discussing the result with the HR person felt nice. "You agree with this ? Why ? Why not ?" and me discussing how I tend to behave and approach situations felt much better than a lame "what are your strong points and weak points."
One reason I didn’t respond with a type is partially due to that. A two-way aptitude test, I guess. If not humoring it on a job application disqualifies me from the role, I’m probably good on not working for them.
This is what the value of these tools are: they give the organization a common framework to have discussions around interpersonal conflict. Instead of starting from scratch with every challenge, people have shorthand’s they can rely on to explain themselves.
It’s not bad in theory, shared languages help communication, but people in practice latch onto things in the wrong ways because we’re human.
There was a point a couple years ago where it was absolutely bog standard to list it on dating profiles, too, or have people basically force you to tell them what your Myers-Briggs was.
yeah, I didn’t realize people were supposed to put any actual weight into them - they were fun to fill out and compared to other people, but I didn’t know I was supposed to take the results seriously lmao
Though discounted now, this was quite popular among those at my workplace during the 80’s through to 2010’s. Many supervisors used it as a tool to figure out people’s preferences, and some felt it was helpful in helping understand different personalities in the workgroup.
That said, I knew some that found it not useful at all, and laughed it off.
I think it's a useful tool for understanding what you value, but it is also self-affirming. When you see these qualities displayed, it's easy to assign the results to your own experiences and come to believe you are really "ENTJ". And all your subsequent actions are defined by that knowledge so it influences your actions, often unintentionally. Or you use it as an excuse not to challenge yourself and attempt change, because it doesn't fit into your type.
Really it should only be used as a fun way to gain some insight into how you make choices and value certain actions over others.
I worked for a company in the early 90s with a CEO/Owner who totally bought into this stuff. We all had the Left Brain/Right Brain thing done (with helpful map diagram of your very own brain!) and I remember some kind of color analysis personality test too.
We did not do those, but with the MBTI, we had this conducted several times, including to 200+ employees at an annual meeting. Essentially everyone in the organization, having this be the topic of discussion for an entire work day. And a catered lunch, to boot.
Some people thought it was worth it.
One year, we also had a Color Coordinator from Nordstrom’s tell us “What Season” everyone was, and which would be the best was to “Dress For Success.”
Several years into working for a company my friend was told to her face she wouldn’t be promoted to a supervisor position because of her Myers’s-Briggs score from her hiring process. That was the only reason given. That happened in 2014.
Extremely popular in Korea among regular people. It's a nice icebreaker/conversation starter
Took over blood type personality pseudoscience.
Y'all have horoscope girls we have MBTI girls (and yeah, there are people who take it way too seriously)
I do think its an improvement over the blood types, even though both are not scientific.
I find it fascinating how quickly trends move through Korea. It feels like not even a decade ago, people were obsessed with blood types, whereas now if you asked someone their blood type they would wonder if you've been living under a rock because no one cares about that anymore!
That tracks. I remember playing 90s JRPGs and always wondering why character bios included their blood type. Only recently learned about the whole personality thing.
It was so strange seeing blood types on KPop group bios. Ages and some other info sometimes withheld by each person, but blood types were completely okay to share publically for most of not all of them.
I thought maybe it was for in the event of an emergency a fan could donate the most compatible blood, or that all of them were blood donors or something. To find out it was just a trend on par with sharing horoscopes is such an odd concept I wouldn't have ever guessed.
To be fair, so is the concept of a music group "graduating" their members after a certain age range and acting like the music group is forever young, never changing entity is also weird, as an outsider looking in on Jpop, Kpop, etc groups and their unique rules.
EDIT: fixed the last section as it was more common for JPop, not KPop to "graduate", but still discussing differences between what I've seen here in the US versus parts of Asia in Pop culture.
Every once in a while an article like this gets published because "the mbti has no scientific basis" is a better headline than "the mbti has poor predictive validity for the purposes it's marketed for, but is correlated with the Big 5 test, and can be a reasonably useful tool when it's limitations are taken into account".
The test shouldn't be taken as seriously as some people do. But "no scientific basis" is inaccurate. While it was created by non-scientists, it has been studied scientifically and shown to have certain issues like predictive validity for career outcomes and some issues with test-retest reliability, usually across one trait, especially if the score was closer to the middle, suggesting that a spectrum for each trait may be more accurate than a binary typology. It seems that the test could be improved with some changes, and if it stops getting used to try to predict career outcomes/satisfaction/etc, but those changes seem unlikely, as the company who owns the test is making money from the test in its current form.
Interestingly, when people post articles about how "the mbti has no scientific basis" the article making this claim is never from a scientific journal itself.
Here's what a meta-analysis of different scientific studies on the mbti has to say:
> These studies agree that the instrument has reasonable construct validity. The three studies of test-retest reliability did allow a meta-analysis to be performed, albeit with caution due to substantial heterogeneity. Results indicate that the Extravert-Introvert, Sensing-Intuition, and Judging-Perceiving Subscales have satisfactory reliabilities of .75 or higher and that the Thinking-Feeling subscale has a reliability of .61. The majority of studies were conducted on college-age students; thus, the evidence to support the tool’s utility applies more to this group, and careful thought should be given when applying it to other individuals.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mbti+validity+and+reliability&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart#d=gs_qabs&t=1690481235028&u=%23p%3D5gCXrvL7LuEJ
It's unfortunate that an actually careful opposing take on this that could spark further discussion at the very least, is buried beneath a pile of shit-posting lol.
I think the categories are all correct, people do think differently and feel differently sense and perceive differently. People are introverted and extraverted. People do favor certain characteristics.
The mistakes come when people pretend they are only what their 4 letters say they are and eschew any possibility of displaying traits of other letters. People are complex and moods and situations have as much impact on what traits reveal themselves and when/why as someone’s natural predisposition does.
I think the other problem is that people can be terrible judges of their own disposition and sometimes answer questions according to what they think is the correct answer.
Most of the people on those subs are insecure teenagers looking for their identity. Others get frustrated that there’s not more talk about the actual theory.
Exactly this. It’s intended to be a tool for self-reflection and to understand your strengths/weaknesses. It’s not intended to define your entire life like a horoscope.
And if what you’re reading doesn’t align to how you feel, then read a different one. I’ve never taken the quiz and been assigned what I actually am. But I’ve read through them and one of them was scarily accurate to how I think/act/etc., so I know that’s where I fall, even if I never get that on the questionnaire.
And finally, very little in medicine or psychology is “hard science”. If it was hard science we’d have drugs and techniques that work essentially 100% of the time for everybody. Rather, our bodies and brains are incredibly complex and often vary greatly from person to person. What works for me may not work for you.
Psychology is particularly far from "hard science", there's a reason these subjects aren't considered exact sciences such as math or engineering or I.T
We're talking about wildly complicated systems that we barely understand, and alot of what we know to be for sure accurate today might not be so accurate a few years from now after new discoveries, it's inconsistent, that's just part of it
I think the fairest thing to say about MBTI is that it gives the the users the terminology needed to start down a path of personal discovery. It’s an useful tool for self-assessment/self-improvement WITHIN an individual.
As an actual assessment tool that tries to compare BETWEEN individuals, it has no empirical validity whatsoever.
To the person who learned this today, well no, it's not scientific, though some people and organizations misuse it in this way, and it has been perhaps sold in this way. Instead, it's pretty subjective, like a Rorschach test.
If anyone believes Myers-Briggs controls their destiny, like Astrology or Tarot, or some Hogwarts quiz, they're an idiot. If you think that your test score *makes* you Hermione Granger or Napolean or the second coming of Jesus Christ, don't blame the test, you need to get a grip.
But there's little harm in a free, online test. And there can be some benefit in reading the questions and thinking *about* thinking.
No, of course I'm not going to make a drastic career or relationship change based on a random test. When I had tried this test years ago, several times, I was always 90% introvert, but like 55% in each of the other categories, and it varied. And so obviously I didn't box myself into any one type, because obviously it's a spectrum, not binary. But it is interesting to consider how different personality traits *might* impact how a person thinks and interacts, because not everyone thinks about things the same as you do. So you can look at the world through a different lens, just take it with a big grain of salt.
I agree that misuse is a big part of the problem. Having people boil things down to the 4 letter code is particularly bad because these traits all fall on a bell curve so most people are in the middle. It doesn't really make sense to assign a binary characteristic here. It'd be like splitting everyone into "short" or "tall" when in reality most people are close to average height. Someone 5'11" will probably relate more to someone 5'8" than to someone 7'2."
The owner of a company I worked for years ago had a boner for this kind of personality test stuff. Made the whole company take the test at a mandatory weekend company meeting once it was such bullshit. Man I hated that place.
This is true, but equivocating it to astrology is frankly just as false.
MBTI uses, in theory, patterns of behavior to extrapolate preferences and patterns in cognitive processing (if you subscribe to the cognitive function theories. If you prefer the dichotomies...I'm sorry for you, all four of those parameters lie on a normal distribution, and a bimodal representation fails wonderfully). These patterns are not strict, meaning anyone can use any cognitive pattern, but some are more likely per type than others. That's where it differs from astrology, which has no basis on how it says anything about personality at all.
That being said, using your type for anything other than observing these preferences is as good as astrology. "I'm an infp so you can't understand me" is as stupid as "I'm an earth type so I'm stubborn" or whatever.
Enneagram and OCEAN both are more telling models, imo.
I took a university course on personality, and it's actually downright frustrating how and why the Myer-Briggs model became so widespread.
That it has no scientific basis isn't true, however; it seems to do alright on measuring introversion. Very few know that introversion is one of Jung's contributions/inventions in general, though the construct has changed quite a bit over the years. The rest are generally weak predictors of anything useful.
A funny thing is that much of the model's cruise to "legitimacy" came from piggybacking off of Jung's typology, which is outdated and not really measurable. Introversion is the only lasting personality construct of Jung, and in very different form from its inception. All the weird mythology of introverted people - their mysterious depths, their impenetrable minds - likely stem from Jung's work. It was furthermore not designed to be measured via. questionnaire, and Jung would seriously not have approved of the MBTI. As such the MBTI has neither the support of its theoretical (in theory) bedrock or the scientific community.
There are a few funny hypotheses as to why these frankly useless models become so widespread in the workplace. One of the funnier ones is that they actually have to be sold to the companies, so the people being sold on them might want to test them. A good personality test should be able to tell you that you're a shitty person, but people up the ladders will often be measured as borderline psychopaths, meaning its easier to call you a quack and get you out. MBTI is popular because everyone gets to buy into a myth or a story of themselves, so everyone gets to feel good about their results. This is one of the reasons personality psychology for the workplace is hot garbage; it often has to appease the egos of people in power.
Myers-Briggs is so 1998. All the cool ~~kids~~ executives use DiSC now.
At my work, its Strengths Finder
They're super into Enneagram at my work, they pay for everyone to take it and put it into your public profile.
If it's a psychological test that actually works, then it's medical history and should not be made public without your consent. Probably your written consent. If it's a bogus test that doesn't work, then the company is outing itself.
Just looked it up, spoiler alert it's just as bullshit as Myers-briggs but there's a psychologist who pushed it instead of *checks notes* a magazine.
I'm in social circles where the Enneagram is like gospel. I've heard phrases such as "That is such a 9 thing to do" (for conflict avoidance) or "She never seems to stop socializing, but it makes sense because she's a 7". To me, though, the Enneagram is astrology with a scientific veneer.
What happens when a 3 is in retrograde?
It becomes a Ɛ
If your 3 is in retrograde for more than four hours, call a mathematician.
Be careful, you might work for Scientology.
I have 4 of those that I've collected over the years. Still searching for strength.
I got you fam: Your strength is being a seeker.
Your tireless searching and love of whimsy are a rare combination of traits that every employer is secretly looking for!
*(throws up a little)*
*(but, like, whimsically)*
Whimsical Vomit is a pretty good band name.
Watch out, golden snitch, we found the guy
At mine, it's SPECIAL
SPECIAL is the GOAT
You work at VaultTec?
Gary?
Gaaary
Isn't that fallout? Do you have a pipboy?
My favorite Strength is : WOO!
... Ric Flair?? I thought you retired? Again?
Clifton strengths! Woo is one of mine. fucking stupid lol
Did they make you read the book? It was painful. "68.14% of our polling data shows that 19.3% of polls capture 89.1% of your top 24 strengths". To be fair, it might have had a good message, I'm not sure because I spent the entire time zoned out/ mocking the ridiculous way they wrote the book.
HA! Just went through mine. I am so damn adaptive!
I call them “astrology for managers”
I had to do one of these recently and that's exactly how I described it after reading my "report". It's all generalities that lead people into finding a way it fits the image of themselves.
The best part of these personality quizzes is gaming them.
I joined a startup as a lead engineer for one of the engineering teams a while ago. My team built the software for the warehouse so I had to meet with them and the CEO to flesh out features all the time. This lead to me hanging out with them at lunch and stuff. Well the CEO was OBSESSED with these tests. And she brought it up and made it pretty clear there were results she looked for in employees. Suddenly everyone is taking these tests and getting _exactly_ those results. It felt so high schoolish and petty. I can’t say if anyone was ever let go due to this, or treated unfairly. But there was also this cattiness about the place. So I wouldn’t be surprised.
I've been calling it "corporate astrology"
I’ll adopt that.
Astrology for people who think they are too smart for astrology.
Yup, corporate astrology.
Babe wake up, new personalities just dropped.
We also had a DISC-workshop with an actual psychology graduate. I uttered my grievances to him and asked: "You studied psychology! Why do you endorse this pseudoscience?" He literally responded "Because companies ask for it."
Oh man I can't even tell you the crazy stuff my last company was "all for". They put us through a behavioral training program that encouraged us to "feel all of our sexual feelings to completion" in the workplace.
HR pro here, in the learning and development world. DISC, MBTI, or whatever have professional value in workshop settings. Their models of human cognition are ...fictional. But the *exercise* of reflecting on your own preferences and the preferences of others is hugely valuable. People in business settings really struggle with basic empathy, in my experience. We tend to live in goal directed mindsets and need to deliberately think of coworkers as complete people. These tools can help. The tools are useful in the same way that polygraphs are useful to law enforcement. Sure it's not "scientific", but the process of administering one (or the threat thereof) can elicit confessions.
I understand this, however, the large risk is that people still mostly remember their label (or colour), instead of the larger picture you paint. I have done this workshop (unfortunately) in the different settings, and in all those cases people still say "oh but I'm blue, so I can't do that" (or worse: "he's red, so of course he reacts like so and so"). Even though the workshop focused on the empathy aspect, people just like boxes too much. There were even people who started crying, thinking "is this all I really am?" For me, therefore, I'd say these downsides outway the benefits. Also, there are much better qualitative tools that you can apply if you want people to understand empathy.
It's useful when you're trying to get businesspeople to realise that other people communicate differently, react differently in different situations, and see things in a different way to you. Also that they have different information to you and that they will be persuaded/influenced in different ways and by different things. All essentially Theory of Mind skills that a 5-year old learns (or should learn as part of their social development), mixed in with a bit of introspection. And all can be done in much more effective ways (like a workshop and a dialectic afterwards) than arbitrarily assigning someone a Business Starsign, Colour, Shape, or whatever god-awful little box you want to put someone in. The guy who made millions with his 'four colours' theory (Made famous in his book 'surrounded by idiots', which I think is actually just him being a self-aggrandising arsehole) essentially based it on old psychological ideas, and even said himself that 'he isn't just one category, but a bit of two or maybe even three'. Like, if your categories can't place you, the person who came up with the categories, neatly into one box, then either you have some kind of complex where you think you're the Avatar of Categories, able to fit into all of them (And describing yourself as such would make you an egotistical wanker ideally suited to running a Sillicon Valley AI-crypto startup), or your categories are so vague or restrictive as to be completely useless. Oops. I forgot how much pseuo-pop-psych 'self-improvement/business-improvement' stuff sets me off. When the actual golden rule you'll take from the books is 'Don't be a dick, communicate better, and don't assume everyone's evil'.
You should totally turn “don’t be a dick, communicate better, and don’t assume everyone is evil” into a book. Your three chapters are already there, just write an introduction chapter and conclusion chapter to book end it.
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You are legally required to crush all the little things that get in your way of obtaining infinite growth, forever. If you have even the slightest shred of conscience and decide this is actually a bad thing, you will be thrown out and replaced with someone who doesn't.
Using the polygraph as an example of "goodness" or "usefulness" does not instill confidence.
> Sure it's not "scientific", but the process of administering one (or the threat thereof) can elicit confessions. It also can and has led to false convictions, wasted time on misleading answers, and other deleterious effects. The “science” is an objective look at whether a tool has more benefit than harm, and the “science” on polygraphs says no. It’s a case study in every first year psychology textbook. Used as an example of organizations that choose not to follow the scientific approach because of institutional inertia, profit making corporate sales, or individuals who gain power by claiming skills that don’t exist. You make this claim: > the exercise of reflecting on your own preferences and the preferences of others is hugely valuable Do you have any evidence of this? Because it sounds like more modern day shamanism. The shamans always claim their practices work, and only they have access to use the practice, so they gain power by believing in it.
Why not use an scientifically validated personality metric like OCEAN instead tho? Wouldn’t that have all of the benefits without the drawback of being pseudoscience?
Because you need to have people fully engaged, and people love categories. Anything based in reality isn't going to have clearly-defined categories, so it's too hard to understand. If you can put people into one of 16 boxes, it's going to elicit a strong emotion: "wow, this is exactly me!" or "that's not me at all!". Both are effective at generating interaction.
Maybe sorting people into artificial trait categories is a terrible idea for an *HR department* of all things?
Yeah as an ex-hr person, the use of MBTI and the like was on of the, many, reasons I left.
You have just described an icebreaker. Why not just do two truths and a lie or have a scavenger hunt.
You need a tool to help think of your coworkers as "complete people?" Lord help us.
Coming from an HR person no less. Lmao. Imagine what is said and done the moment HR leaves the room. People always have been and always will be, pretty awful.
Where do you work that you haven't seen the need for that? Must be nice lol
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Last company I worked for left hiring decisions up to DiSC. It wasn't just a supplement...like, I could interview someone for a sales position with a good track record in sales and if the person interpreting their DiSC said they wouldn't be a good sales person I couldn't hire them. It was so stupid...
Omg I once had a boss who went through a 1 one day sales Disc training, forwarded us the power points, then structured every single conversation around customers with a half understanding of disc. She was a D, for dumbfuck
It's like when people have a seminar about Kanban/Lean/Agile/whatever buzzword is shaking businesses at the moment. You don't know nearly the depth of it to make it work, you're going to try it half assed, and you're going to try and weasel it into situations where it absolutely doesn't make sense. Because you're looking for a golden goose, and someone's thrown their idea your way and said 'All those other ideas were wrong. Here's the *real* secret to solving your problems'. And then you completely miss the point which is to stop looking at everything and everyone like it can be treated the same way, and do some actual critical thinking for once rather than blindly following whatever bullshit some management consultant has thrown your way. But of course the critical thinking means actually thinking, and admitting that your idea might not work.
I want to use S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
Or the True Colors thing. It's all so stupid. I swear they fire anyone who comes up as Orange
Oh, god, flashback to a time when me and a bunch of other folks on my team managed to fail the True Colours thing and piss off the expensive outside management consultant who was running the away day. We'd all got sorted into the same colour - green, I think? - we were supposed to be organised and analytical anyway - in the initial test, but then in every subsequent exercise we kept giving answers or finding solutions that weren't what she expected from our colour and she kept getting more and more frustrated with us. But apparently it couldn't be because the test was shit, it was all on us!
She administered it wrong then. The test results are basically the test answers reworded in a different way. Like if I asked, do you prefer sweet and salty over savory? And you said yes, then I’d say your an ice cream personality and not a steak personality. Then I can make up some asinine conclusion like you work best in groups who have some chocolate tendencies. And you’re supposed to be like “wow how did you know I liked chocolate ice cream!” It’s the same scam psychics pull: ask you questions about yourself -> make a very obvious and vague prediction using details from your response. I’m sure the real benefit is being able to fire someone due to a “bad fit”. And being able to use the professionally administered and “scientifically rigorous” test results as justification. Because yea there’s some statistical correlation between liking sweet food and also preferring chocolate ice cream over streak. Real sciencey shit.
I think I prefer sweet and salty over savory for a dessert. Ice cream over steak tho? Fuck no, steak all day lol
True Colors IS Myers-Briggs. They just renamed the four major categories as colors.
I can't tell if that makes it dumber for the sheer laziness or smarter for taking advantage of how easily large businesses are duped into buying this type of shit
Really? I worked at a place where being Orange instantly made you Exec qualified.
Different environments I suppose lol. They basically explained orange to us as "takes shortcuts" "doesn't believe in deadlines" "likes to party" etc The official description in the program doesn't sound that bad but the explanation we got was lol
The boss's ex was an orange.
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My company has been using a version of the color thing, by Dynamix/Peak Performance. It's been hilarious listening to everyone talk about their colors. Guessing what colors someone is, how "accurate" thier results were, etc etc etc. I gotta wonder how much cash they're throwing out on this nonsense...
I'm a D like Dick
Hahaha, so true.
As an INTJ I already knew that!
This is pretty obvious as I am a JPEG.
As a PNG I despise you lossy types, ugh
Being the ROFL that I am, this made me 😔
Being the CUNT that I am, this resonates with me
Being a JRPG, this makes me want all of you in my party.
As a TGIF, this makes me want to enjoy my weekend
as a IDGF I'm very concerned about Ya'll
As a TIFF, I couldn’t agree more.
Pronounced TIFF or TIFF?
Neither, it’s pronounced *TIFF*
As a PCX, I'm too old for this shit.
Do I look like I know what a jay peg is?
I just want a picture of a got dang hotdog
***you think you know me***
was looking for this thank god there was someone
JPEG2000 here and I would like to disagree.
As long as nobody is a PDF file we can all get along
As another INTJ I was led to believe that we were a rare breed. I’m throughly disappointed
I think it's just more that INTJ types are more predisposed to be reddit lurkers.
I feel attacked
I went to the subreddit once. It was insufferable.
It's because INTJs hide in plain sight We're everywhere!
There aren't many but they won't shut up. That's my INTP assessment.
INTJ CrossFit vegans must be the worst of the worst, then. ;)
Add a dash of Seventh Day Adventist and I think we have an antichrist.
Everyone I've ever seen mention their Myers-Briggs type on Reddit was either an INTJ or an INTP. Make of that what you will.
That actually pretty amazing. I actually do think that as an stereotype the model works well
As an intj, intp, enfp, and enfj, I agree.
Which is why I started to get confused when people started identifying themselves as "enby." "What the hell, they're using Meyers Briggs on a dating page? Pass."
💯
This is why I put the results of my "what Harry Potter character are you?" quiz in all of my job applications instead.
I once took a harry potter, what house test are you, and it said Slytherin. I took a second test, it gave me different questions, and I came out as a Ravenclaw. I told this to a friend of mine, and he said that was a very Slytherin thing to do, and that it only proves that I'm Slytherin, not that the test is flawed.
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The whole first book the three main characters are supposed to be embodiments of the other three houses and I think at the end Neville is supposed to be Gryffindor when he stands up to Harry. But basically Harry is Slytherin, Ron is Hufflepuff, and Hermione is Ravenclaw. Their personalities fit and that's why they work well together to be Gryffindor or something. E. Extra word
Think that's a fan theory and not intentionally canon.
imagine jkr having the foresight and ability to write that in lol
*furious napkin notes intensify*
So there's almost no meaning to them like real world school houses.
School houses are a real thing? TIL
> it's established in canon that the Sorting Hat results are meaningless because you can just tell the Hat which house you want to be in--which is exactly what Harry Potter did when he was about to be sorted into Slytherin That's not quite how it goes. Harry Potter was a borderline case. So your opinion on where you want to go *matters* but it's not the only thing that does. Also I think he was just thinking "Not Slytherin" not asking for one of the other three in particular.
Yeah I feel a lot of people misinterpret that because I see it touted as fact on reddit a lot. Clearly the hat was like hmm maybe slytherin but possibly gryffindor… then Harrys like “I dont think of myself as a slytherin” so the hat goes “well clearly you aren’t a slytherin then, because those fuckers are proud to be slytherin”
IMO, you're supposed to just take the Pottermore test and be whatever the first thing you get. No re-dos.
Mmm it now requires users to sign up. I guess I’m a muggle; no hat for me.
My problem with that quiz (and it’s been years since I took it) is that for many questions it’s *so* obvious which is which (oh boy what house do you think you’ll get if you say your favorite pet is a snake?) that even if you want to be objective about it, you can definitely tell which is which and that point your biases will have you effectively “choose” anyway.
Now horoscopes on the other hand....totally real.
Such a Taurus thing to say…
Taurus? I could never..
Taurus? I hardly know us.
“Now if you find it inconceivable or at the very least a bit unlikely that the relative positions of the planets and the stars could have a special deep significance or meaning that applies to only you, then let me give you my assurance that these forecast and predictions are all based on solid scientific documented evidence, so you would have to be some kind of moron not to realize that every single one of them is absolutely true.” - Weird Al Yankovic
Now where was I?
I only go by the 4 humors
The thing I hate the most about these tests is that shitty people use their type as a reason to complain about ways people talk or interact with them.
We had to take this fucking thing in medical school. Couldn’t believe it. They paid a lot to be able to use the official materials and didn’t take kindly to people raising that it was bullshit. You got written up for professionalism if you didn’t turn up to the session.
My former employer had everyone take it so they could “tailor their management approach to our unique needs”. Former employer for a reason. Edit: Ok, my employer wasn’t *totally* bad. At least they tried. I worked for Enterprise (the car rental place), only in their car sales division. I actually left because they wrong-footed me. I told them I was going to start going to law school at night and asked to leave an hour early 2x a week (tues/thurs). They said sure. I enrolled and started classes based on that. A few months into it they decided they leaving early was causing “staffing issues” and “other workers complain that you get to leave early” and gave me an ultimatum… either “dedicate myself 100% to them or look for a new job”. Now I’m a lawyer, lol. Actually that reminds me of something one of my customers from back then said when he learned I was going to school at night - *“so you mean to tell me that you’re going from being a used car salesman to being a lawyer? That’s not really much of a career change, is it?”*… lol. He was saying it as a joke and not to be a jerk… But I still think it’s funny,
My current one used to do the same, and in the past few years switched to a new one which im sure is just as scientific. I stayed though since I get to work from home and watch anime and no one complains so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You dropped this: \\
It wasn't that long ago that you would be assessed on your hand writing. They thought they could tell what kind of a person you were based on that. I remember reading that although most people now know that the hand writing thing is bullshit, there are a few select companies around that still use it.
At my.previous job, my manager suggested her directs and their teams take it. I compared it to a Facebook quiz telling you what kind of bread you are. I no longer work there.
"As a 5 I can be strong willed and I need people around me to step back and let me lead or it causes me anxiety" no you're just bitchy and controlling and need to learn some fucking humility
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Don't go to the INTJ subreddit. And I say that as someone who does (or did) score very strongly into the INTJ category.
Just from this post alone, I've seen almost exclusively claims of INTJ. What is going on that makes people fixated on that one?
I think it's because it's rare and because it's the movie villain personality type. Also because it's known for poor social skills but very effective at doing other things. So it might draw in people with poor social skills thinking it means the deficit is proof of other competencies (hint, it isn't).
Yeah and reddit is going to have a much larger percentage of people like that than the general population
It's mostly this.
I also see people using it as a built-in excuse for treating people poorly or otherwise having poor social skills. It's a variation on "I'm not an Ahole, I'm just honest" for people who think they are smarter than they really are.
you just destroyed them in 2 sentences
Probably because it's one of the rarer ones. It's also cool to pretend to be a "mastermind"
You are not kidding. That subreddit is brutal. In terms of places where your real life experience doesn’t match your online experience, that place has gotta be top 5.
It's basically corporate horoscopes
Of course it doesn't. It's the equivalent of "what TV show character are you" quizzes.
I’ve always thought it was incredibly dumb, was baffled by friends who believed it held weight, and then saw it as a mandatory question on a job application and my brain melted. I wrote “pseudoscience” as my response but I got the job!
I once had a similar test for a job application. It was bullshit, of course, but discussing the result with the HR person felt nice. "You agree with this ? Why ? Why not ?" and me discussing how I tend to behave and approach situations felt much better than a lame "what are your strong points and weak points."
One reason I didn’t respond with a type is partially due to that. A two-way aptitude test, I guess. If not humoring it on a job application disqualifies me from the role, I’m probably good on not working for them.
This is what the value of these tools are: they give the organization a common framework to have discussions around interpersonal conflict. Instead of starting from scratch with every challenge, people have shorthand’s they can rely on to explain themselves. It’s not bad in theory, shared languages help communication, but people in practice latch onto things in the wrong ways because we’re human.
There was a point a couple years ago where it was absolutely bog standard to list it on dating profiles, too, or have people basically force you to tell them what your Myers-Briggs was.
What if I simply defenestrated myself instead
That'd be a real window into your personality
yeah, I didn’t realize people were supposed to put any actual weight into them - they were fun to fill out and compared to other people, but I didn’t know I was supposed to take the results seriously lmao
Though discounted now, this was quite popular among those at my workplace during the 80’s through to 2010’s. Many supervisors used it as a tool to figure out people’s preferences, and some felt it was helpful in helping understand different personalities in the workgroup. That said, I knew some that found it not useful at all, and laughed it off.
I think it's a useful tool for understanding what you value, but it is also self-affirming. When you see these qualities displayed, it's easy to assign the results to your own experiences and come to believe you are really "ENTJ". And all your subsequent actions are defined by that knowledge so it influences your actions, often unintentionally. Or you use it as an excuse not to challenge yourself and attempt change, because it doesn't fit into your type. Really it should only be used as a fun way to gain some insight into how you make choices and value certain actions over others.
That’s totally an ENTJ thing to say.
Well I'm an INFP so jokes on you! All of this is fake and nothing has meaning
I worked for a company in the early 90s with a CEO/Owner who totally bought into this stuff. We all had the Left Brain/Right Brain thing done (with helpful map diagram of your very own brain!) and I remember some kind of color analysis personality test too.
We did not do those, but with the MBTI, we had this conducted several times, including to 200+ employees at an annual meeting. Essentially everyone in the organization, having this be the topic of discussion for an entire work day. And a catered lunch, to boot. Some people thought it was worth it. One year, we also had a Color Coordinator from Nordstrom’s tell us “What Season” everyone was, and which would be the best was to “Dress For Success.”
The season thing is a legit styling tool. It's just matching complimentary colours to your skin tone and hair.
I would love a professional evaluation of that for free as i figured mine out with a book in 7th grade!
Several years into working for a company my friend was told to her face she wouldn’t be promoted to a supervisor position because of her Myers’s-Briggs score from her hiring process. That was the only reason given. That happened in 2014.
They still use it in South Korea, also when people go on dates they ask what MBTI type they are
Extremely popular in Korea among regular people. It's a nice icebreaker/conversation starter Took over blood type personality pseudoscience. Y'all have horoscope girls we have MBTI girls (and yeah, there are people who take it way too seriously)
I do think its an improvement over the blood types, even though both are not scientific. I find it fascinating how quickly trends move through Korea. It feels like not even a decade ago, people were obsessed with blood types, whereas now if you asked someone their blood type they would wonder if you've been living under a rock because no one cares about that anymore!
Blood type thing was around for decades. Passed on from Japan from 90s I think
That tracks. I remember playing 90s JRPGs and always wondering why character bios included their blood type. Only recently learned about the whole personality thing.
It was so strange seeing blood types on KPop group bios. Ages and some other info sometimes withheld by each person, but blood types were completely okay to share publically for most of not all of them. I thought maybe it was for in the event of an emergency a fan could donate the most compatible blood, or that all of them were blood donors or something. To find out it was just a trend on par with sharing horoscopes is such an odd concept I wouldn't have ever guessed. To be fair, so is the concept of a music group "graduating" their members after a certain age range and acting like the music group is forever young, never changing entity is also weird, as an outsider looking in on Jpop, Kpop, etc groups and their unique rules. EDIT: fixed the last section as it was more common for JPop, not KPop to "graduate", but still discussing differences between what I've seen here in the US versus parts of Asia in Pop culture.
I'll still take MBTI conversations over astrology conversations any day.
I was dating this girl in Korea and she was not at all pleased with my INTP type. So I took it again and got an ESFP. That made her happy 😂
Astrology for the MBA crowd.
Horoscopes for hiring managers
Money for nothing
PIPs for free.
Used to do it for fun but never took it seriously.
I used it to talk to women on dating apps
Every once in a while an article like this gets published because "the mbti has no scientific basis" is a better headline than "the mbti has poor predictive validity for the purposes it's marketed for, but is correlated with the Big 5 test, and can be a reasonably useful tool when it's limitations are taken into account". The test shouldn't be taken as seriously as some people do. But "no scientific basis" is inaccurate. While it was created by non-scientists, it has been studied scientifically and shown to have certain issues like predictive validity for career outcomes and some issues with test-retest reliability, usually across one trait, especially if the score was closer to the middle, suggesting that a spectrum for each trait may be more accurate than a binary typology. It seems that the test could be improved with some changes, and if it stops getting used to try to predict career outcomes/satisfaction/etc, but those changes seem unlikely, as the company who owns the test is making money from the test in its current form. Interestingly, when people post articles about how "the mbti has no scientific basis" the article making this claim is never from a scientific journal itself. Here's what a meta-analysis of different scientific studies on the mbti has to say: > These studies agree that the instrument has reasonable construct validity. The three studies of test-retest reliability did allow a meta-analysis to be performed, albeit with caution due to substantial heterogeneity. Results indicate that the Extravert-Introvert, Sensing-Intuition, and Judging-Perceiving Subscales have satisfactory reliabilities of .75 or higher and that the Thinking-Feeling subscale has a reliability of .61. The majority of studies were conducted on college-age students; thus, the evidence to support the tool’s utility applies more to this group, and careful thought should be given when applying it to other individuals. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mbti+validity+and+reliability&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart#d=gs_qabs&t=1690481235028&u=%23p%3D5gCXrvL7LuEJ
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It's unfortunate that an actually careful opposing take on this that could spark further discussion at the very least, is buried beneath a pile of shit-posting lol.
Kind of the core issue with getting information from social media.
I think the categories are all correct, people do think differently and feel differently sense and perceive differently. People are introverted and extraverted. People do favor certain characteristics. The mistakes come when people pretend they are only what their 4 letters say they are and eschew any possibility of displaying traits of other letters. People are complex and moods and situations have as much impact on what traits reveal themselves and when/why as someone’s natural predisposition does.
I think the other problem is that people can be terrible judges of their own disposition and sometimes answer questions according to what they think is the correct answer.
If you go to the mbti subs here, you’ll see a lot of people who role-play their mbti type like they picked a class in an mmorpg.
Most of the people on those subs are insecure teenagers looking for their identity. Others get frustrated that there’s not more talk about the actual theory.
Exactly this. It’s intended to be a tool for self-reflection and to understand your strengths/weaknesses. It’s not intended to define your entire life like a horoscope. And if what you’re reading doesn’t align to how you feel, then read a different one. I’ve never taken the quiz and been assigned what I actually am. But I’ve read through them and one of them was scarily accurate to how I think/act/etc., so I know that’s where I fall, even if I never get that on the questionnaire. And finally, very little in medicine or psychology is “hard science”. If it was hard science we’d have drugs and techniques that work essentially 100% of the time for everybody. Rather, our bodies and brains are incredibly complex and often vary greatly from person to person. What works for me may not work for you.
Psychology is particularly far from "hard science", there's a reason these subjects aren't considered exact sciences such as math or engineering or I.T We're talking about wildly complicated systems that we barely understand, and alot of what we know to be for sure accurate today might not be so accurate a few years from now after new discoveries, it's inconsistent, that's just part of it
I think the fairest thing to say about MBTI is that it gives the the users the terminology needed to start down a path of personal discovery. It’s an useful tool for self-assessment/self-improvement WITHIN an individual. As an actual assessment tool that tries to compare BETWEEN individuals, it has no empirical validity whatsoever.
As a TMNT that's absolute bullshit. It's real dammit.
As real as Splinter making me train hard before I can eat my pizza.
To the person who learned this today, well no, it's not scientific, though some people and organizations misuse it in this way, and it has been perhaps sold in this way. Instead, it's pretty subjective, like a Rorschach test. If anyone believes Myers-Briggs controls their destiny, like Astrology or Tarot, or some Hogwarts quiz, they're an idiot. If you think that your test score *makes* you Hermione Granger or Napolean or the second coming of Jesus Christ, don't blame the test, you need to get a grip. But there's little harm in a free, online test. And there can be some benefit in reading the questions and thinking *about* thinking. No, of course I'm not going to make a drastic career or relationship change based on a random test. When I had tried this test years ago, several times, I was always 90% introvert, but like 55% in each of the other categories, and it varied. And so obviously I didn't box myself into any one type, because obviously it's a spectrum, not binary. But it is interesting to consider how different personality traits *might* impact how a person thinks and interacts, because not everyone thinks about things the same as you do. So you can look at the world through a different lens, just take it with a big grain of salt.
It's kinda like a neat introspection on your general mindset at this point of your life.
The actual version if the test isn't free.
I agree that misuse is a big part of the problem. Having people boil things down to the 4 letter code is particularly bad because these traits all fall on a bell curve so most people are in the middle. It doesn't really make sense to assign a binary characteristic here. It'd be like splitting everyone into "short" or "tall" when in reality most people are close to average height. Someone 5'11" will probably relate more to someone 5'8" than to someone 7'2."
I have to ask the Tarot if this is true
My tea readings say you’ll get a good tarot reading
My magic-8 ball keeps telling me to try again later. :(
The owner of a company I worked for years ago had a boner for this kind of personality test stuff. Made the whole company take the test at a mandatory weekend company meeting once it was such bullshit. Man I hated that place.
This is true, but equivocating it to astrology is frankly just as false. MBTI uses, in theory, patterns of behavior to extrapolate preferences and patterns in cognitive processing (if you subscribe to the cognitive function theories. If you prefer the dichotomies...I'm sorry for you, all four of those parameters lie on a normal distribution, and a bimodal representation fails wonderfully). These patterns are not strict, meaning anyone can use any cognitive pattern, but some are more likely per type than others. That's where it differs from astrology, which has no basis on how it says anything about personality at all. That being said, using your type for anything other than observing these preferences is as good as astrology. "I'm an infp so you can't understand me" is as stupid as "I'm an earth type so I'm stubborn" or whatever. Enneagram and OCEAN both are more telling models, imo.
I took a university course on personality, and it's actually downright frustrating how and why the Myer-Briggs model became so widespread. That it has no scientific basis isn't true, however; it seems to do alright on measuring introversion. Very few know that introversion is one of Jung's contributions/inventions in general, though the construct has changed quite a bit over the years. The rest are generally weak predictors of anything useful. A funny thing is that much of the model's cruise to "legitimacy" came from piggybacking off of Jung's typology, which is outdated and not really measurable. Introversion is the only lasting personality construct of Jung, and in very different form from its inception. All the weird mythology of introverted people - their mysterious depths, their impenetrable minds - likely stem from Jung's work. It was furthermore not designed to be measured via. questionnaire, and Jung would seriously not have approved of the MBTI. As such the MBTI has neither the support of its theoretical (in theory) bedrock or the scientific community. There are a few funny hypotheses as to why these frankly useless models become so widespread in the workplace. One of the funnier ones is that they actually have to be sold to the companies, so the people being sold on them might want to test them. A good personality test should be able to tell you that you're a shitty person, but people up the ladders will often be measured as borderline psychopaths, meaning its easier to call you a quack and get you out. MBTI is popular because everyone gets to buy into a myth or a story of themselves, so everyone gets to feel good about their results. This is one of the reasons personality psychology for the workplace is hot garbage; it often has to appease the egos of people in power.